QUEBEC — Justice Minister Bertrand St-Arnaud announced Monday that the Quebec cabinet has agreed to the 18-month extension requested by Justice ...

MONTREAL — For months, the Parti Québécois government has been righteously condemning the abuses in the financing of municipal politicians that the Charbonneau inquiry has exposed. Last week, when the government finally tabled its bill to “reform” the sordid mess, we learned that the government’s outrage is phony.

Municipal Affairs Minister Sylvain Gaudreault’s bill to change the financing rules in time for November’s elections in cities and towns across the province is a sad joke. That’s for three reasons.

The legislation, Bill 26, is not to take effect until July 1 — a scant four months before voting day. Many politicians by that time will have filled their campaign chests with private donations under the existing discredited rules. The new rules will thus primarily influence late-starting candidates.

To have serious impact on the 2013 municipal elections, Gaudreault should have shown the same sort of hustle that a cabinet colleague, Bernard Drainville, demonstrated with his own bill to reform provincial elections: Drainville, the minister for democratic institutions, proposed that legislation in November, the National Assembly adopted it in December and it went into effect Jan. 1.

No justification exists for Gaudreault not doing the same.

The new rules are too meagre.

The bill would cut a citizen’s total donations to parties or to individuals from the current maximum of $1,000 to a maximum of $300. Drainville’s law for provincial elections shows greater seriousness: It cuts the maximum donation much further — from $1,000 to $100.

What’s good for provincial candidates should be good for municipal ones, especially since the latter’s travel and TV expenses tend to be less.

In any case, it matters little by how much the ceiling is lowered. Canny bagmen will still go about collecting $1,000 cheques until Canada Day.

Even more serious is what the bill does not do. It fails to fix existing practices, enshrined in law, that give advantages to candidates running for political parties and that handicap independent candidates.

One such unfair practice concerns subsidies. A party can collect an annual subsidy from municipal taxpayers based on the share of votes it got in the previous election. Union Montreal, for one, has received about $150,000 this year, just as it in each of the three years since the last election. It’s able to use the money to raise its profile.

Yet a winning independent candidate gets nothing.

It would have been good to see a bill enacted into law months ago that halted this subsidy in 2013. That would have created a more level playing field for all.

Gaudreault says that his bill is but a stopgap measure for this election. He says he’ll come up with a permanent law later. I hope such long-term legislation would lessen the dominance of parties in many cities.

That, however, would mean defying the political culture. I’m astonished by the respect the system of municipal parties gets from supposedly sophisticated observers — including political scientists, pundits and successive municipal affairs ministers. Nothing seems to shake their faith, not even the ongoing spate of allegations that parties have, by virtue of their illegal fundraising, been at the core of corruption and collusion scandals not only in Montreal but also in Laval, Longueuil, Boisbriand and Mascouche.

Granted, parties are useful when ideology is needed, which is why parties are justified at the provincial and federal levels. But clearing snow and deciding on zoning requires less ideology than pragmatism. That’s why most North America cities do well with independent politicians exclusively.

True believers in municipal parties argue that independents can be crooked, too. That’s so. Yet it’s harder to corrupt a city council composed of independents.

Note, for example, that business people appearing before the Charbonneau inquiry have alleged that, to obtain a coveted contract or a zoning change, they have had to give illegal money to just two people in Montreal — Bernard Trépanier, a top Union Montreal official, Frank Zampino, head of the city executive committee and a UM member. If there were no parties, payoffs might be needed to dozens of members of the 65-member city council to obtain a majority vote.

You can’t ban municipal parties — the Canadian Charter of Rights wouldn’t allow it. But you can change laws that are biased in their favour. Real long-term reform would, for example, end the double standard whereby parties can collect donations during the four years between elections while independent candidates can only collect them during the election year.

But I’m dreaming. You can hardly expect a government unwilling make serious changes in time for the Nov. 3 elections to take long-term reform any more earnestly.